GeForce GTX 1660 Ti is NVIDIA's answer for the highly competitive sub-$300 segment. The card is based on the all-new TU116 graphics processor, which has been specifically designed to meet the demands of that market, which is mostly "price". Unlike other Turing GPUs, TU116 does not feature acceleration for RTX real-time raytracing or DLSS because the specialized hardware consumes a significant portion of the die area on other Turing GPUs, which increases manufacturing cost significantly. NVIDIA did keep the other improvements of Turing though, like GDDR6 memory, larger caches, concurrent execution of float and integer operations, and adaptive/variable rate shading.

As a result, when averaged over all our gaming benchmarks at 1080p, we see the GTX 1660 Ti beat the Pascal-based GTX 1070 and roughly match AMD's RX Vega 56—pretty impressive for a mid-range card. While we don't have a GTX 1660 Ti reference design, we expect this card to perform very closely to one because it is clocked at reference speeds, with a little bit of extra performance gained from a +10 W higher board power limit. Compared to the RTX 2060, which is NVIDIA's next-fastest SKU, the MSI GTX 1660 Ti Ventus XS is 16% behind. Compared to the GTX 1060 6 GB, which the GTX 1660 Ti replaces, the performance uplift is 40%, although at a higher price point. AMD just released the RX 590, on a 12 nanometer process no less, to address the growing requirements of the mid-range segment, and the GTX 1660 Ti makes short shrift of that, offering almost 30% more performance. With those performance results, the GTX 1660 Ti is a great choice for gamers running maximum details with a Full HD monitor. If you are willing to dial down detail settings a bit, it should be able to reach 60 FPS at 1440p in most titles, too.

EVGA's card is the only board in today's reviews that comes with a triple-slot cooling solution, which is quite surprising for a 130 W board design. Given that multi-GPU setups are dead and most motherboards and cases have enough space, size shouldn't be an issue unless you're going for an ITX build. The problem is that neither temperatures nor fan noise are any better than on the other dual-slot cards today. Actually, with 38 dBA, the EVGA XC Black puts out significantly more noise than other GTX 1660 Ti cards, and I am not sure why. If I had a choice, I would have allowed higher temperatures, say up to 74°C, which would let the fans run much slower, resulting in better fan noise. The card is also missing the highly popular idle-fan-off feature, which turns off the fans completely during idle, Internet browsing, or light gaming. With the fan running in idle, the card is whisper-quiet though; you won't hear it inside a closed case. EVGA doesn't include a backplate with their card, which is not unexpected for a card going for MSRP. MSI's Ventus XS, on the other hand, has a plastic backplate that only costs a fraction of a metal backplate and definitely helps with the overall look and feel of the product.

Compared to Pascal, Turing improved power-efficiency once more, and the GTX 1660 Ti is no exception. Actually, it is the most power-efficient GPU design we've ever tested. EVGA has increased their board power limit by 10 W to unlock additional performance, which does cost a little bit of efficiency, but their card is still leading our performance per watt charts. Additional, manual power limit increases are not available.

Manual overclocking worked extremely well, gaining over 12% in real-life performance for performance levels similar to an overclocked MSI GTX 1660 Ti Gaming X, which is a much more premium design. The final GPU clock speed is similar to the much more premium GTX 1660 Ti Gaming X, which is evidence that there is no binning going on between MSRP and OC models. The GDDR6 memory chips overclock extremely well, too, going from 1500 MHz to 1880 MHz.

The lack of ray-tracing and DLSS on the GTX 1660 Ti seems like a big deal at first, especially considering how much NVIDIA is pushing those technologies. While both are extremely promising, they are not the most important things to have right now, especially when every dollar matters. While I have no doubt that RTX support will be growing vastly, only a few titles support it at this time, so I don't think anyone could be blamed for skipping the tech for now and waiting for it to mature more. Looking at silicon economics, including RTX/DLSS would have either driven die size (= cost) so high that reaching the targeted sub-$300 price point wouldn't be possible anymore, or the number of shader cores would have had to be reduced, which would have resulted in no performance improvement over AMD—NVIDIA went the other route. "RTX" is a great vehicle for NVIDIA to sell a feature, which is more than just "higher FPS". Specifically, this targets people who are comfortable with 1080p 60 FPS and even playing at lower details if their GPU is affordable. If, however, they feel they miss out on visuals, something DX12 couldn't achieve, they might be willing to spend more and go for the RTX 2060, for example. The next step for NVIDIA is transitioning to the 7 nm production process, which increases density and should allow smaller GPUs to have RTX, too. I also wouldn't be surprised to see NVIDIA haters on the forums who previously dismissed RTX as "useless" now ask "wut no RTX?"

Priced at $279, the EVGA GTX 1660 Ti XC Black comes at NVIDIA MSRP pricing, which is great as it makes the card much more competitive against other offerings, be it from AMD or NVIDIA (Pascal). The GTX 1660 Ti does compete with the RX 590, which it beats with ease: 30% faster at a fraction of the power consumption even though many RX590 designs have less fan noise than the EVGA XC Black. The RTX 2060 starts at $350, is 15% faster, and offers NVIDIA's RTX features, like ray-tracing and DLSS, which definitely make it an option if you can save up more money and are looking to play at 1440p. Strong competition has come in the past few days from AMD Vega 56, which has seen its price dropped to $330 (€269 including VAT in some European countries). This of course makes a compelling argument for people looking for price/performance, but Vega 56 runs much hotter and noisier than GTX 1660 Ti. Looking at the board designs, I have no doubt that prices for the GTX 1660 Ti can go down much further, so I wouldn't be surprised to see it at or below $250 soon, at which point it would spark the upgrade-itch for many users, especially those with older cards, like the GeForce 900 series.